Category: Blogging

‘Fiscal Cliff’ Deal Rumored; Obama Supporters Cheer Tax Increases on Rich

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Ace has examined the reported terms of the deal, which would raise taxes on those earning more than $400,000, if indeed it is a deal, but deal or no deal, President Obama refused to be distracted from his most important second-term priority, scapegoating Republicans:

Barack Obama held a last minute press conference today to bash Republicans and gloat about his election victory. At one point in his speech he bragged about how he’s going to be able to raise taxes on wealthy Americans.
His supporters cheered — as if they earned it.

Happy New Year, America. This is what you voted for.

 


Credit Where Credit Is Due: Breitbart, Beck and the Dana Loesch Lawsuit

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Back in the Day: Andrew Breitbart was a guest on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show

In April 2011, Matthew Boyle of the Daily Caller reported that Glenn Beck had been accused of using bloggers’ content without attribution:

Mandy Nagy, a conservative blogger known online as Liberty Chick, spent untold hours last fall creating a chart that tracks left-wing billionaire George Soros’s influence over media organizations, only to see it appear, in its exact form and without any attribution, on Beck’s famous chalkboard. “We were laughing that he went to all the trouble of [recreating] the visual on the blackboard,” Nagy said, not sounding entirely amused.
John Sexton, who blogs at VerumSerum.com, has provided Beck with material several times, and has sometimes received credit for it. But in several other cases, Sexton says, “he’s used our stuff without any hat tip at all. I don’t understand that.” According to Sexton, in one instance even famously liberal CBS News credited VerumSerum.com for content it used, while Beck, who lifted the same material, did not.
Pamela Geller of AtlasShrugs.com recalls watching Beck use a story she wrote about campaign contributions the Obama campaign received from donors in Gaza. Many other publications referred to the story, Geller says, but only Beck refused to give her credit for it.
“I went through thousands of pages of FEC documents and it was an enormous task to uncover the campaign contributions from Gaza, a Hamas-controlled area, to President Obama,” Geller says. “It’s in my book and it wasn’t a secret that I wrote the story. I don’t know how to describe such outrageous and proud thievery. I like his work, but he’s a thief.”

You can read the whole thing. Let’s be clear that Glenn Beck is certainly not the only broadcaster or journalist who has been accused of failing to give adequate credit to the work of others, and bloggers especially get used to being shortchanged by the big shots.

That April 2011 article, however, was sort of an Empire Strikes Back episode in what became a widespread backlash against Beck after he had a falling-out with Andrew Breitbart. And this is relevant now because, as I reported Christmas Eve, “people are telling me that it was Glenn Beck who wanted to hire Dana Loesch away from Breitbart.com,” and Dana has filed a federal lawsuit against Breitbart.com.

Let’s be clear (a) there’s a whole lot of backstory to this, which may never be entirely known, and (b) I cannot verify that there were actually any negotiations between Dana and Beck — it’s just what “people are telling me.” Obviously the plaintiff in a lawsuit can’t talk about it, and nobody at either Breitbart.com or Beck’s operation has said a word about it. Then again, I haven’t gotten any angry e-mails denying it, so . . .

In order to understand why Breitbart.com might take especial umbrage at the idea of Dana Loesch leaving to join Glenn Beck’s rival New Media operation, it helps to listen to a podcast interview Andrew Breitbart recorded in December 2011 with Stephen K. Bannon.

Because Bannon is now executive chairman of Breitbart.com, this is a very important interview. Becca J. Lower and Danielle Saul have provided a full transcript, which I briefly excerpt here:

Breitbart: [T]here are a lot of Beck supporters. In the past, Beck has made a lot of mistakes and his supporters come out and try to defend him, because Beck is a coward and will not defend himself when he makes a mistake or lies about a person or steals content —
Bannon: Hold on, I want to go back over this: you’re saying that Glenn Beck’s a coward, Glenn Beck’s a liar, and you’re saying that Glenn Beck steals material from people?
Breitbart: Oh yes, and this is well-documented. And whenever he does it, he never answers to the charges. He’s a coward. He won’t have me on the radio show, he won’t have himself [and] me on GBTV, refused to have me on Fox when he threw me under the bus. During the Sherrod thing, I asked to be on TV or radio to explain why he had it wrong. Months later, we found out why he wouldn’t have me on is because he lied to his audience on television that he didn’t do the Sherrod story. . . . In order to rectify the situation, he went on TV and tried to pretend like he was above the fray and told O’Reilly, to his face, a lie . . .
He also has historically been found to take countless bloggers’ content, to turn it into book gold, to turn it into chalkboard gold . . .He will not answer to the charges, and his minions online like to defend him. . . .

You can — and certainly should — read the whole thing.

 

PREVIOUSLY:

 


Muslims Now Using Lawfare to Threaten ‘Zionist’ Bloggers in Canada

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“Zionist” is becoming a synonym for “Anyone Who Doesn’t Want to Liquidate Israel,” as Kathy Shaidle explains:

As we’ve known for some time, Canadian Muslims have been putting together a lawfare case designed to silence my husband’s blog, BlazingCatFur.
Now they’ve admitted this online at a Khomenist site, asking for donations to support The Man Who Is Suing Us in separate actions related to Canada’s Human Rights Commissions.
They specifically say they are targeting my husband because he is a “Zionist.” . . .

Read the rest at Five Feet of Fury and hit their tip jar — I did.

Objectively Worse: Democrats to Blame for the Hyper-Partisanship They Decry

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NYPD arrest Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, Oct. 1, 2011

Commenting on the post-election rancor — e.g., Log Cabin Republicans targeting Chuck Hagel — Professor Glenn Reynolds observes:

You know, somebody — Dave Weigel or Matt Yglesias, I think — was tweeting the other day that the GOP was doing worse post-election than in 2008. Well maybe; at this point, after all, Bush was still in the White House. But Obama is definitely doing worse than in 2008. First the Susan Rice debacle, then the departure of scandal-plagued EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, and now the stalled Hagel nomination. Definitely not as well as in 2008.

Meanwhile, we see gloomy prospects for avoiding the “fiscal cliff,” and the question we ought to be asking is, “How did we get here?”

The problem in trying to answer that question is that the information stream is polluted by the Conventional Wisdom manufactured by the national media, where Democrats out-number Republicans by a factor of no less than 7-to-1. Thus, we must begin the quest for truth by un-learning what our indoctrinators —  the “apparatchik MSM,” as Ed Driscoll calls them — would have us believe, and consider the possibility that something quite nearly opposite is true.

Our liberal friends would have us believe that the problem is that Republicans have been captured by Tea Party extremists and are engaged in politically motivated “obstructionism” because the GOP is captive — “epistemic closure”! — to extreme voices on Fox News and talk radio.

What if that MSM-produced narrative is, in fact, the mirror-reverse of the truth? This relates to a comment I made about Barrett Brown, the “Anonymous” spokesman arrested in September:

The specific object of my critique is the outlaw “civil disobedience” vigilante protest mentality involved in the “Anonymous” and “Occupy” movements, an attitude that excuses crime so long as it is committed against enemies of The Cause.
This attitude was revived and popularized by anti-war protesters during the Bush era, where the information-warfare aspect of their propaganda was clearly displayed: President Bush himself was de-legitimized as an election-stealer, the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job,” and the U.S. military response to those attacks was “war for oil,” allegedly undertaken on behalf of Halliburton, etc. There is a narrative that justifies Barrett Brown’s demonization of the FBI, you see. The fact that this left-wing rationalization has passed its sell-by date — like the fragments of the Weather Underground that continued their “revolutionary” violence long after the Vietnam War ended — does not prevent people from continuing to carry the radical torch as if it were still 2005.

As Rodgers and Hammerstein might say, you have to be carefully taught to think the way Barrett Brown and his comrades think, and what Andrew Breitbart called the “Democrat-Media Complex” never bothers to expose and debunk the counterfactual beliefs of the radical Left. Why? Because liberals believe that having a loud, militant left-wing fringe — angry shock troops to assault the GOP-allied institutions of bourgeois society — is good for the Democrat Party.

Whatever you may think of the Republican Party, it is not (as the MSM would have you believe) controlled by “Birthers” and other kooks, and the GOP is not pursuing any kind of extremist agenda. It is actually the Democrats who embraced a dangerous anarchist fringe movement, “Occupy Wall Street,” and in fact it is Democrats who are even now pursuing the radical OWS agenda against “the 1%”: Taxes must be increased on “the rich,” Democrats keep telling us, and they are willing to take us over the “fiscal cliff” if they don’t get their way.

 

Further Tales of ‘Heroic Hatred’: Down the Rabbit Hole With Neal Rauhauser

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Neal Rauhauser was a speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference

“I’ve been all over Patterico for the last several weeks, as he looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate . . .”
— Neal Rauhauser (“Stranded Wind”), Daily Kos, “Weinergate Perps Pay Dearly,”July 27, 2011

Patterico comments on the habits of sociopathic monsters: “I have seen this exact pattern play itself out, again and again.” One of his commenters offers a helpful comparison:

Like Richard Dawkin’s attacks on religion — completely irrational and hateful but he justifies it by claiming that he’s opposing something hateful and irrational.

Is the hatred of religion a coincidental aspect of this problem? Let us recall that Barrett Brown, the former “Anonymous” spokesman who was arrested in September after an online video meltdown, was once the communication director of the atheist group Enlighten the Vote (a/k/a, Godless Americans Political Action Committee). Brown’s atheism and his insuperable arrogance were hand and glove: Assuming that religious people are ignorant bigots, to whom he was infinitely superior, Barrett then proceeded to a series of assumptions that seemed to him equally plausible, ultimately including the erroneous assumption that he could get away with threatening to “destroy” an FBI agent’s life.

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

Along his path to destruction, Barrett Brown let himself fall under the sway of Neal Rauhauser (a/k/a, “Carlito2000”) and was drawn into Rauhauser’s paranoid fantasies involving HB Gary, Jennifer Emick, Tom Ryan, et al. This brings us back around to something that will surely be of further interest to Patterico. Mike Stack today posted a message to someone who is engaged in a feud with Emick:

Neal Rauhauser is the reason I was SWAT-ted.
Your girlfriend is friends with Neal. . . .
You have a long-standing war with Jen Emick and the only reason that she was thrown into the mix was because again of what Neal Rauhauser did with the Michigan Police Department.

Stack was the first victim of SWATting in the wake of the WeinerGate scandal. Rauhauser became obsessed with the idea that Weiner was the victim of a hoax, eventually focusing on Patterico as the alleged mastermind of the (wholly imaginary) conspiracy against Weiner. In the comments of Stack’s post today, someone linked to a Pastebin document from August, transcribing an online chat in which Rauhauser (using the alias “BangoSkank”) was trying to gather information on his enemies. A few key excerpts:

20:59 you want a Maltego graph of this stuff? . . .
21:00 yer smack in the middle, I started with nachash dox
21:00 and melded it into my other stuff . . .
21:11 This Maltego graph is sort of the top level map
21:11 for the last two years, for me
21:12 There is a federal grand jury in D.C. and I presume one attached to the cyber task force in Chicago . . .
21:12 this graph contains what I know about the subjects, and I have left a number of their associates who appear only due to social media link analysis . . .
21:23 New York grand jury, too. Forgot that one.
21:23 So that’s a map of those I think may be culpable, their close associates, and then a ring of Twitter accounts that are well connected enough that they are interesting for comparison’s sake when I get new information . . .
22:19 I did this in an iterative fashion for the cluster of groups I watch
22:19 and then one day one of those connected eggs
22:19 matched a twitter account that pulled up when I brought a mailing list into Gist
22:20 and then the light came on, because it was the third time a specific funding source had popped up on the graph . . .
22:21 NY grand jury, DC grand jury, Chicago cyber task force
22:21 and it all come back around to the same central place

OK, you’re asking, “What the heck is Rauhauser talking about?” And I can’t fully answer that question, however (a) Rauhauser has repeatedly claimed to have high-level law enforcement contacts, (b) Rauhauser has routinely asserted that his enemies, including Patterico and others, are the targets of federal investigations, and (c) this particular online chat took place just a few weeks before Barrett Brown’s meltdown.

What Rauhauser seemed to be focused on in that particular chat were a number of enemies of “Anonymous,” including Emick, William Welna and various of their supposed associates. At one point, Rauhauser made this comment about “White Hat” hacker Thomas Ryan:

22:50 I catch Ryan from behind, he gets a skull fracture with something good and heavy

Hey, why the hate, Neal? Oh, maybe it’s because in October 2011, Ryan obtained “Occupy Wall Street” leadership planning e-mails that were published by Andrew Breitbart! And we remember that Rauhauser was involved (representing himself as an agent of Brett Kimberlin’s “Velvet Revolution” non-profit) in the “Occupy” movement.

So whereas Neal Rauhauser was allied with the “Occupy” thugs, Ryan was allied with Andrew Breitbart and opponents of “Occupy.”

In August, Neal was claiming that his enemies were under investigation by federal grand juries and a Chicago-based federal “cyber task force.” What happened instead? Within a matter of weeks, after Rauhauser tried to sic Barrett Brown onto his enemies, Brown melted down and was arrested on federal charges. At one point during his 13-minute video rant, Brown accused Thomas Ryan of being an “FBI informant.”

Think about this for a minute: In Barrett Brown’s perverse worldview, being an FBI informant — i.e., helping law enforcement investigate crime — makes someone an agent of evil.

Similarly, in Rauhauser’s worldview, Thomas Ryan deserves a “skull fracture,” while Patterico (who is himself an agent of law enforcement) can be falsely accused by Rauhauser of criminal wrongdoing — a “perp“! — and yet Rauhauser, having shown himself willing to lie to accomplish his purposes, expects his political allies to view him sympathetically as the victim of a “wingnut” conspiracy.

People like Brown and Rauhauser inhabit an inverted moral universe, where those who obey and uphold the law are the villains, while criminals — including Rauhauser’s associate, “Speedway Bomber” Brett Kimberlin — are noble and heroic warriors against “wingnuts.”

At any rate, the commenter at Mike Stack’s blog who linked the Pastebin document asks of Rauhauser, “Can you just see this wanker in court trying to sell his ever-changing conspiracy theories?” Read it for a laugh. We have not heard the last of Neal.

 

Sociopathic Monsters: ‘Heroic Hatred’

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In September, Ladd Ehlinger Jr. published “A Breathtaking Lack of Empathy,” an attempt to explain Neal Rauhauser’s sociopathic tendencies:

He thinks of people as playthings to be toyed with. By categorizing them as “trolls” he can do to them whatever he wishes, and creates all sorts of elaborate games to entrap them. His revelry in their misery is quite apparent, justified by dehumanizing those he manipulates.

This dehumanization of his targets — viewing them as objects — is characteristic of the sociopath, and Rauhauser’s delight in playing “conflict cupid” (inciting others to attack his targets) displays the sadistic aspect of his warped personality. Ehlinger noted Rauhauser’s aptitude for recruiting similarly deviant characters to assist him in his malicious projects. Among Neal’s most persistent henchpeople is “Occupy Rebellion,” who recently decided to share this in the comments at a pro-Kimberlin site (which I won’t link, for obvious reasons):

We have every single right to mock Andrew Breitbart and any other Breitbart trash who dies. Since THEY are the ones who mock people’s deaths every single day. . . . Andrew Breitbart was a career criminal who made it his mission to destroy people & their families. . . .
NO ONE linked to Breitbart has the right to ever claim their “victims” of anything. NO ONE linked to Breitbart has the right to ever “grieve” for anyone they know who died. NO ONE CARES. We should only “grieve” if it’s Breitbart trash who dies but not for anyone else??

Here you have someone utterly dehumanizing not only the late Andrew Breitbart, but also anyone who ever associated with him.

This is how damaged people become monsters: They externalize their inner feelings of worthlessness as hatred of demonized scapegoats, whom they construct in their own minds as symbols of wrong, so that doing evil to the scapegoat is (in their twisted thinking) an act of righteousness. In the perverted mind of the obsessive sociopath, hatred of the scapegoat is thereby endowed with a heroic quality.

The peculiar “heroic hatred” directed at Andrew Breitbart by these monsters is not merely the product of politics, but rather an obverse reflection of their own damaged egos: Breitbart was famous and successful; they are obscure failures; his fame and success must therefore be re-imagined by them as unjust and symbolically evil.

What is striking — and, in a weird ironic way, a tribute to Breitbart’s greatness — is how this obsessive hatred has persisted even after Breitbart’s death, so that now Rauhauser, “Occupy Rebellion” and others (most of them involved with the “Weiner Truther” cult) have transferred their “heroic hatred” to Breitbart’s associates.

Trapped inside their own self-justifying delusions, and huddling online among those who share their strange obsessions, these monsters are incapable of understanding how drastically abnormal their hateful attitudes and actions really are.

Scofflaw David Gregory Busted by Bloggers, MIA From ‘Meet the Press’

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Professor William “Just a Blogger” Jacobson is available to accept your high-fives after he helped lead the citizen-journalist posse that exposed David Gregory’s violation of D.C.’s stringent gun laws. Dylan Byers of Politico has the latest network spin:

NBC’s David Gregory, the subject of a now-popular police investigation, is on vacation and will not host this Sunday’s edition of “Meet The Press.” . . .
Gregory’s vacation was scheduled prior to last week’s show, according to NBC. He is scheduled to host the Jan. 5 edition of “Meet the Press.”
NBC News has declined to comment on the investigation.

“According to NBC” — yeah, the gold standard for veracity there, eh? Professor Jacobson has at last verified the Dec. 24 police e-mail:

NBC contacted MPD inquiring if they could utilize a high capacity magazine for their segment. NBC was informed that possession of a high capacity magazines is not permissible and their request was denied. This matter is currently being investigated.

So, in full knowledge that possession of a 30-round magazine is illegal in D.C. — where Meet the Press is recorded — David Gregory and NBC willfully violated the law just so Gregory could dramatize his anti-Second Amendment lecture to the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre.

Now . . . the rest of the story: Politico‘s Katie Glueck confirmed that D.C. police denied NBC permission to display the illegal magazine, but TMZ reports that a Meet the Press staffer conspired to circumvent D.C. law by appealing to the feds:

Well-placed law enforcement sources tell TMZ … a staffer from “Meet the Press”  called ATF before the show aired to inquire about the legality of David holding  the empty magazine during a segment on gun control. We’re told the ATF person contacted the D.C. police to find out if the District of Columbia — the  place where the show is broadcast — had a law prohibiting such a display.
Our sources say the D.C. police official informed ATF David could legally show the magazine, provided it was empty. An ATF official then  called the staffer from “Meet the Press” to inform them they could use the magazine.

What? The ATF abetting violation of gun laws?

I’m just shocked by this allegation that the federal agency which helped arm Mexican drug gangs would approve such a clearly illegal scheme.

Is David Gregory really on vacation? Or is he a fugitive from justice?

UPDATE: Evil Blogger Lady has a round-up on this scandal.

UPDATE II: Ed Driscoll rips it up real good.

UPDATE III: More blog commentary from Twitchy, NewsBusters, Hot Air, The Lonely Conservative, Clayton Cramer and I Own the World.

PREVIOUSLY: NBC: Nothing But Criminals

 


Islamists Target African Christians

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Pamela Geller today highlights the atrocities against Christians in Nigeria attributed to the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram.

Boko Haram “has killed hundreds in its campaign to impose Sharia law” since 2010, the BBC reports, describing the latest attacks:

The violence comes on the same day that the Pope — as part of his Christmas Day address — prayed for harmony in Nigeria, lamenting what he called “savage acts of terrorism” that frequently target Christians.
The head of the Christian Association of Nigeria in Yobe, Idi Garba, told AFP that many worshippers at [Evangelical Church of West Africa] “are still missing”.
“I have been informed that six bodies have been recovered,” Mr Garba said.

CNN reports:

At least 12 people died in northern Nigeria when attackers raided two churches during Christmas Eve services, police said.
One assault occurred at the Church of Christ in Nations in Postikum, in Yobe province. Gunmen attacked worshipers during prayer, killing six people, including the pastor, and setting the building on fire.
Worshipers also were attacked at the First Baptist Church in Maiduguri, in Borno state. A deacon and five church members were killed.
They were the latest strikes against Christians in the region. More than 30 people died in a wave of Christmas Day attacks in the north last year, blamed on Boko Haram, a militant group that has targeted Christians and Muslims it considered insufficiently Islamist.

When America is weak, evil is strong. Evil worldwide has been emboldened by the weakness of the Obama administration’s policies.